Kind donation

Last week we received an amazingly kind donation from the generous residents of Bagnor Village. Over the Christmas period they had their annual duck race. This event raised £450 for The Castle School. The wonderful people at Vodafone then matched this giving us a grand total of £900. This money will help us to continue to enable our students to experience musical instrument lessons including Cello and Tenor horn - something that is so very important to our young people. Here is a picture of the cheque presentation - the article is in this week's Newbury Weekly News on page 12.

We would all like to say a massive thank you to both the residents of Bagnor village and the staff at Vodafone.

Celebrating in the Newbury Weekly News

Last week we had two pieces in the local paper, which was very exciting. Firstly, we celebrated receiving our Quality Mark Award and had a feature in the Newbury and Thatcham Advertiser. Here are the pupils celebrating. The full story can be read by clicking this link: Quality Award Article

Secondly, we got a piece in the Newbury Weekly News last week celebrating our Space Week. This will hopefully soon be on the website - if you have a copy of last week's paper it is on page 9.

Thirdly, we were very excited to receive a cheque of £900 on Friday. This was from £450 raised by the lovely residents of Bagnor at their annual duck race and this was matched by the lovely people at Vodafone. We will hopefully be in the newspaper this week as well. The money is going to go towards supporting a group of youngsters in learning to play the Cello. A massive thank you to all at Bagnor Village and at Vodafone for their generosity.

Space Week

Whizz, bang, pop, wow! These are the sounds that have been heard around The Castle School this week. All things Space were investigated and experienced, from space cookery, planet making, alien construction and rocket launching. At the start of the week we even had our own planetarium in the Primary Hall. The pupils have enjoyed making moonscapes with lots of different materials. You can see these displayed around the school - they are wonderful. They have enjoyed drama, creating a story of a journey into space. They have launched their own water rockets into the sky. And finally each class has made a scale model of a planet so that we have a our own mini version of the solar system. A wonderful week for all, thanks to the dedication of the staff and the hard work of the pupils.

Two pupils from Tintagel make their water rocket

Quality Mark Award

We are very pleased to announce that we have been awarded the highly regarded Quality Mark Award for the fourth time. This is quite an achievement and only 3 other schools in the whole of West Berkshire have achieved this 4 times so far. The award is very important to us as a school as it recognises that we have very high aspirations of everyone in our school community to achieve the very best outcomes for all our young people. The rigorous assessment looked at many areas in the school related to the development of basic skills in English and Maths for pupils including how the school focuses its whole school strategy on pupil progress in basic skills, how we analyse the data and set targets, the use of an innovative range of teaching approaches and a robust monitoring programme. The assessors – who check very carefully and spend a whole day in school interviewing staff, pupils, parents and governors and looking at the impact of our work on basic skills – said that we “richly deserved” the award and in addition to the achieving all the elements of the award criteria they wished to record the “…warm, supportive and respectful relationships evident across the school” and also the wished to acknowledge “the quality of the Outreach support provided to mainstream schools”. Thank you to our community in enabling us to gain this award. We now wish to build on this and develop English and Maths even further.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year. We look forward to welcoming all our pupils back today for the start of this Spring Term. The pupils will be looking at science, space and the solar system this term which will involve lots of exciting events and activities. Science week will take place on w/b 13th January. This week will see lots of different activities taking place including Sensory Story moonscapes, rocket building, space cooking, designing an alien and the whole school making a model of the solar system on the school field! On top of that we have a professional group coming in to set up The Science Dome which is a multi-sensory experience on space. This will help our young people learn about the Apollo Moon Landings and the solar system. What an exciting term.